I've been following fireplace posts here at Houzz for a while, and the consensus from commenters does seem to be that stacked stone is becoming dated. Your inspiration photo looks a little awkward to me in my personal opinion because of so much heavy stone that isn't really counterbalanced by strong design features elsewhere in the room. It is a heavy, busy feature in an otherwise minimalist decor. My own personal fireplace at home has brick surrounding just the fireplace and then sheetrock around the column above. If you have the budget to do tile for the entire column, you might look at something like a marble look tile. There was an Architectural Digest feature on Jessica Alba's home this year, and she has several fireplaces in her home that she re-did with this sort of style. You might be interested in her home tour here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2mtebeR3rA

Fire is the least of the issues. That floor plan needs some work. Kitchen, baths, all of it. Before you build, Particularly kitchen and the beds/bath. You want a view to a john from the dining?

The dimensions seem not accurate as well.

Thanks, Silverlined. The picture I attached wasn't for the look we are going for - it was mainly to see the height of the ceiling. It's the same design built by another builder - so you can see the space itself although our finishes will be different. I agree with you about the stacked stone, which is why we were planning to go with tile instead. We will be having fairly modern features in the rest of the house which is why we were thinking of tile. If we were to go with a stacked stone look, I did like the look of a flat edged stacked limestone but I think we are going to go with tile instead. Did you have any thoughts on the width of the fireplace - do you think 4 ft would look too narrow? We happen to have an open concept house of similar width for our living room so I've tried taping it out on our fireplace but it's hard to picture fully since we do not have the tall ceiling.

Thanks, Jan. I'm interested in feedback for the fireplace. We are building on mainly granite so we had to go with a slab foundation and will have a well so we needed to alter the space for our water treatment system/mechanical room. This is not our final design as some changes have been made to make the space more functional. We were somewhat limited for square footage but are making the most of our small space with wall hung toilets and some other changes to maximize the bathroom spaces.

For that height, yes, 4 feet sounds narrow. Be sure to take a peek at that home tour with the tiled fireplaces that I linked above. They're very luxurious. How one of them was created is explained starting around the 1-minute mark. You can see a second fireplace with a totally different color scheme but same concept at the 5-minute mark--link again is here.